First of all, I’m not a single parent. I cannot feel and entirely know what it takes. This article is inspired by those rare weeks when I had to take care of the kids alone while also working. It is obviously a very different thing.
I think that single parents have a hell of a difficult job in many aspects. Even families where there are two working parents have an extremely difficult job if they don’t have their extended families nearby.
In our family, we definitely don’t have anyone nearby who we could regularly count on. We discussed a lot with my wife about whether she should go back to work or not. This leads to the question of what are the challenges here in France when it comes to raising kids. Some of them would be a challenge everywhere, some feel to be country-specific.
- School starts at 8h30 and ends at 16h30. Fair enough, there is daycare… If there are available places and if daycare providers happen to work and are not on strike for whatever reason that is often not even communicated. The “if there are available places” part highly depends on your region. There are regions where this problem is literally unknown, but in many towns and cities, it’s a big trouble. When one of the parents is not working it’s impossible to get a place, if they want to start working somehow they have to manage until they get a place later as a working parent.
- There is no school on Wednesdays. As far as I know, it’s because they think that 5 days of long school days are too much for the kids. Maybe it is. In my opinion, they keep this system in place in order to provide more work to private teachers, sports clubs, etc. As a parent, you have to manage those days somehow. Either by hiring someone or by not working. Again, if both the mother and the father are working and you’re lucky, you might get daycare. But they don’t get to sports or art classes. Otherwise, you don’t work on that day or you pay someone to manage the kids. In the city where we used to live, there are swimming lessons provided in the municipal swimming pool for a relatively small fee. Those kids who have two working parents are prioritized. The lessons are from 9:30 AM to 10:20 AM. Let me repeat, kids with two working parents are prioritized. We discussed with some French parents and even they don’t understand how working parents should be able to handle those slots. Probably they can’t and hence there were some extra places left for children like ours.
- The “P” tax system. Some say that “P” is for progressive, but I think it’s for punishing. I think that a progressive tax system is punishing the diligent. Progressive means the more you earn, the higher your tax rate is. I agree that the more you earn the more you should pay in taxes. But only in real sum, not proportionally. After a certain point, your extra work has diminishing returns. What is good in the French system though is that it handles families as one unit. At the same time, this also means that a second salary might bring in so little money after taxes and extra childcare, that it’s not worth (re)entering the market. In exchange, you barely get to see your kids. You drop them off early, you pick them up late, and then you do the homework and it’s already bedtime. The family is not a family anymore.
Others told me that the financial parts are pretty much the same in the UK.
If this is so complicated for two working parents, how should a single parent manage all the tasks?
Option one, you have to pay. But given that relatively how little money most people earn, that’s out of the question for the majority.
And here comes the home office into question.
If you can work from home and you only have to drop kids off at a school at walking distance, you almost get 8 hours of time at your home (office). It might be a bit less and don’t forget about lunch break, but if you’re home early from the school pick-up you might still get some time to work between the arrival and preparing dinner.
With a home office, you can get everything done, you don’t lose so much of your time with the kids because of the commute between the school and office and you don’t have to pay for daycare.
Not to mention that the regular French strikes will be much less of a problem. It’s still a problem but on a different scale.
Working from home is a blessing for families.
Well, there is still the question of Wednesdays and school holidays. But with a little bit of flexibility things that are impossible if you have to work from an office become possible working from home.
Taking the home office away for whatever reason means that managing a family becomes incredibly more difficult for single parents and considerably more difficult for families with two working parents. But it’s even punishing families where only one of the parents works. In most cases, an RTO means that the father gets to see their kids much less.
You might say that it used to be the case before and that’s right. We also managed life without electricity or penicillin. Or paid vacations. You probably wouldn’t support taking it away saying that we used to live without those features.
Also, I don’t think that the extra flexibility makes parents working from home less effective. Maybe they don’t work traditional, consecutive hours, because kids have to be dropped off and picked up, but we also value this flexibility and make sure that we don’t abuse it because it’s so important for organizing our lives.
On the other hand, you have to go the extra mile to have social connections. That’s true. But I never considered it healthy to rely on your job for your social life. But that’s the topic of another day.
Conclusion
I think that working from home provides some cool benefits for everyone, but for parents, it’s a real game changer. It gives us more time to be with our kids without working less, by cutting the time we spend on commuting. Not to mention the money we can save for better purposes.
In my view, taking that away is a crime against families.
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